Education, Education, Education
November 14, 2008
Deep in a distant comment, Peter Woodbridge mentioned this video that he’d made out of frustration over issues of class and education in Great Britain. It certainly merits a post of its own.
Promises Lost
November 14, 2008
From today’s Inside Higher Education is news of a new report Promise Lost: Why So Many College-Qualified Students Don’t Enroll in College from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
With these students — who are disproportionately low-income or students of color — schools are doing their part: These students have taken a college prep curriculum and gotten decent grades.
But, because of the high costs of college, inadequate information about financial aid and loans, and guidance counselors responsible for hundreds of students, these students are not applying for or enrolling in college.
There are so many ways that low-income kids are left behind.
With achievement gaps in schools, it’s all too easy to scapegoat teachers.
But when kids are achieving and still have no way up and out, there are no obvious scapegoats, and thus, it seems harder to get anyone incensed.
Measuring What Matters
November 11, 2008
The Law School at UC Berkeley is looking beyond the LSAT that predicts only first year law school success, to include measures that predict success as a lawyer in admissions decisions.
And we should not be surprised to learn that on the alternative measures, gender, racial, and ethnic gaps are minimized.
In K-12 schools, no one really believes that the qualities that will eventually make young people successful (or not) as adults can be measured only in the week-long testing marathons to which they are now subjected.
But we have no coherent conversation about what — beyond reading and math –they’ll need to thrive in this complicated world or how we ensure that we’re teaching and assessing those things, also.
It’s an important move to begin asking at the point of law school admission about the qualities that predict success beyond the classroom.
It’s a different but more pressing question to ask how we value and nurture some of those same qualities in children who otherwise may never dream of going to college, because their public identities now are shaped by very narrow measures that identify them as failures.
How do we even begin the conversation about educating for — and measuring — what matters in K-12 schools?
Race, Class, and the Election
November 9, 2008
There’s so much to write about the election and so little time, but I’m highly intrigued by the many things that have been written about race and class in this election. We’ve seen microphones and cameras thrust into the faces of any number of undecided white, working-class voters who were all too eager to explain their indecision in jumbled statements about race, change, and “liking” Sarah Palin.
But certainly, I kept thinking, there are at least some middle-class voters still undecided who would say equally puzzling things? Or at least middle-class voters who, having decided, would explain their choices in such tangled terms if they had not learned middle -class ways of evading frank talk about race?
But the media seemed insatiably curious about the white- working class racism, assuming, it seemed, that there was no need to even question whether race was still an issue elsewhere across the economic spectrum.
I’d love to hear what other have been reading and hearing on such things.
I’ll offer only a few snippets in the short time that I have to write this morning:
In my own family, the chain email questioning how someone from Obama’s background could possibly have gotten into Harvard on his own merits (with the clear implication that he had to have been sponsored by those whose radical causes he’ll now champion) was forwarded by the wealthiest, college educated uncle-in-law.
And I read on Working Class Perspectives of white middle-class businessmen’s gloom on election day.
Conversely, I was intrigued by yesterday’s New York Time article on the gradual transformation of voters in Levittown, PA to support for Obama, and by This American Life’s radio show on the ground game in Pennsylvania which included unprecedented direct and frank talk about race within the unions (see Union Hall, Act 3).
I hope to write more about this sometime soon, but in the meantime I’m curious:
How might the conversation about race and class be changed by this election? What are others hearing?
